Books, glorious books. Sometimes they have this way of showing up at just the right time, don’t they? In the middle of the questions, the transitions, the uncertainties, a book can often be the gentle hand on your back, guiding you toward the clarity and peace you didn’t even know you needed. That’s why in each issue of InHabit Magazine, we’ll share an excerpt from a book (or two) that we believe has the potential to expand how we think, feel, and move through midlife.

This month, I’ve chosen The Way Home by Ben Katt. Ben’s story is a reminder that even when we’re busy helping others, we can easily lose ourselves. He’s spent years walking alongside people facing the hardest circumstances—homelessness, addiction, trauma—and yet, like so many of us, he realized he was disconnected from his own heart. His voice, enhanced by his work and reflections on the On Being podcast, is one you can trust. It’s honest, it’s real, and it speaks right to the heart of what it means to come home to yourself.

This is fitting for our Beginnings issue as it’s about the courage to start over, to leave behind what no longer serves, and to step into the new. I hope Ben’s words move you the way they’ve moved me.

Here’s to finding your way home.

Peter, Founder of InHabit Life
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Excerpt from The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife
‍By Ben Katt

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                One rainy fall morning I was charging up a hill near the end of a jog. Any other day I would dash around the corner and sprint the last ten blocks to my house. But this day was different. When I reached the top of the hill, my legs burning and music blasting in my ears, a string of words from within suddenly interrupted me.

                "“If you don’t have your heart, you have nothing,” the inner voice said.

                It stopped me dead in my tracks. Breathing deeply, I pulled out my blaring earbuds and placed my hands at my sides. I couldn’t run anymore. I knew exactly what this voice was telling me, and it wasn’t about my heart rate. It was about my soul. In that moment it dawned on me that for a long time I had been slowly and quietly losing my heart amid the ordinary stuff of being human—marriage and family and community and work.

                The problem wasn’t just that my life was busy and full of commitments.

                The bigger issue was how I was approaching everything.

                It would take years for me to realize this (as the pages of this book will prove!), but for the previous year, the past decade, and probably my entire adulthood, I had been ruled by a three-headed monster: striving after success, pursuing perfection, and constantly seeking the approval of others. I had come to believe that these were the only ways I could earn the love and acceptance of others. The sad but inevitable consequence of chasing after external validation through these things was that I had become estranged from my own internal world, from who I truly am, from my heart.

                It’s actually pretty remarkable if I think about it: In my work as a social entrepreneur, community organizer, and neighborhood pastor, I had spent nearly a decade coming alongside vulnerable neighbors who were well acquainted with trauma and experiencing some brutal combination of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and sexual exploitation. My work alleviated suffering and fostered belonging. I helped countless people find their way home. And yet there I was. Lost. Feeling like I didn’t belong. And trapped in my own form of suffering. You can’t make this stuff up!

                At the same time, it also makes a lot of sense that I wasn’t receiving for my own life what I was preaching and practicing for others. First, because my line of work was perceived by many to be good and virtuous, and since it didn’t offer the dangling carrots of paychecks, promotions, and power, I fooled myself into thinking I was immune to the obsession with achievement, perfection, and performance that dominates so much of our society. I was in the “helping professions,” after all! But I was absolutely in on the game, the game of looking for fulfillment in some external idea or possession or status or opinion. The trick was that I was just playing the game in my own way.

                Second, I failed to see that I was losing my heart because I wouldn’t admit it was possible. My work brought me to the front lines of trauma. The stories I heard and the wounds I witnessed were unimaginable. It made complete sense that many of these neighbors’ lives had spiraled out of control. But my life wasn’t that dramatic. No divorce, no death in my immediate family. No illness, no financial hardship, no abuse—not to mention all the oppression I avoided as a white straight male American! But, as I would discover, I did carry my own pain. I just needed to give myself permission to acknowledge it—we all do, no matter how loud or quiet. Because if we don’t acknowledge it, we keep sending it on to the next generation, to our communities, and to the world. Pain that is not processed is passed on.

                That morning message—If you don’t have your heart, you have nothing—interrupted all of these false narratives and opened my eyes to my lost heart. On one level, it rattled me enough for me to notice how I was becoming withdrawn in all my relationships and signaled my burnout. At a deeper level, it put a spotlight on my fundamental confusion about who I am and why I am here.

                The inner voice declared that I had a choice to make. I could choose to continue down the achievement-oriented, approval seeking path, on which I was slowly wasting away. Or I could choose to walk a different way. I could seek after something else—my true self, my soul, my heart. My home.
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While the particularities of my experience may have been unique—the rain, the run, the real or imagined voice welling up within me—the choice I was being confronted with was not. It is always and everywhere the same choice.

                Between remaining stuck in an identity or role you’ve outgrown and venturing beyond the familiar into a freer, fuller version of yourself.

                Between being constrained by a false, fragmented form of yourself and walking the way home to wholeness.

                Between the million ways to lose your heart and the one way to get it back.

                Everywhere I look I encounter people wrestling with this choice. To be clear, it is not always front and center. The choice between the million ways and the way is often in the background, behind the presenting issues of relationships and careers, transitions and tragedies, and opportunities and failures. 

                I stumbled upon signs of the choice just a short time ago on a weekend trip for my brother’s fortieth birthday on a mini coach bus filled with a dozen men in midlife as we wound our way through the Kentucky hills from one bourbon distillery to another. The choice was there as we toasted to my brother’s resilience, not just surviving the pandemic as a restaurant owner operator, but also finding new ways to thrive in his personal life. It was there too, as a successful but exhausted doctor entertained thoughts—and not for the first time—of what other line of work he could go into. And it showed up as a father of three discussed the challenges of caring for his aging parents through illness until death and the resulting implications for his business venture.

                Beyond the Bourbon Trail bus, I’ve witnessed the choice in the friend growing in awareness of the emotional toll it takes on her to always be trying to make those around her happy, and the coaching client dealing with mounting anxiety who acknowledges he is over-consuming cannabis. And I see it all over the journey of the mother, fresh off a three-month sabbatical with her husband and daughter, who is now unable to go back to the corporate world that once defined her, as well as the neighbor who is equally terrified about retiring and not retiring because his identity is so wrapped up in the work he does.

                Beneath the surface of all these varied experiences and circumstances is this choice between a life-diminishing path and a life-giving one. And just as the presenting realities are distinct for everyone, so are the identities, roles, and expectations we each need to contend with. My journey to get my heart back required that I shed my addiction to producing, perfecting, and performing, and beneath that, a distorted view of what it means to be a loyal helper. But what a person is attached to can take many shapes. Clinging to fear, security, or shame. Holding on to an insatiable need to be needed. Grasping for power and control. Retreating into passive cowardice. Hiding behind anger. Playing the provider, protector, or peacemaker. And a multitude of attachments that can drag people down the million ways to lesser lives.

                You won’t always know what you need liberation from when you begin the journey. That’s fine. Whatever form it takes will eventually make itself known. All you need to do is choose to take the way home. And if that’s the choice you make, this book is here to help you.

So what is this way?

                It is an old way that many others before you from across culture, place, and time have traveled. It is a pattern that includes three movements:

                        Leaving the familiar.

                        Falling into the unknown.

                        Rising to wholeness.

                Phase one consists of the process of leaving the familiarity of the false version of yourself that you’ve settled for, whether it be achiever, perfectionist, people-pleaser, victim, control freak, antagonist, escapist, or any other unhealthy, limiting attachment. This is your Impostor identity, and whatever form it has taken, it becomes apparent that it no longer fits. This first phase represents the initial interruption, unraveling, and separation from life as you’ve known it.

                Phase two involves falling into the unknown. Unable to depend on the former version of yourself and the world you had constructed, you become vulnerable, confused, and lost. This phase involves a series of confrontations as you must undergo the death of who you thought you were in the struggle to reclaim your heart.

                Phase three is the task of rising to wholeness, to your real self. You’ve recovered your heart, but now you must meet the challenges that come with reintegration into the world of everyday life, relationships, and work. You are reborn—and grateful for it—but need to figure out your new place in the world.

                During a six-year period of my life, beginning with that If you don’t have your heart, you have nothing moment, I traveled on this way. But I didn’t discover or invent it. It is an adventure that humans have been embarking on for a long time. Joseph Campbell, the twentieth-century mythologist, was an investigator of this way. In his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces and beyond, he looked at myths, sacred texts, folklore, and fairy tales from across cultures and religions and saw a common quest in all these diverse stories, a single story appearing across time and place. He famously called this universal way home to wholeness “The Hero’s Journey.”

                Whether or not you’ve ever heard of it, you already know this pattern. You’ve seen it running through old sacred stories and spiritual schools, modern movies and books, and the real life of anyone you’ve ever met who is living their fullest life. The details are different, but it is the same story. While the journey for each character, real or imagined, features distinct guides, particular challenges, and unique twists and turns, each iteration always expresses the same foundational pattern: Leaving, Falling, Rising.

                It is the biblical and musical story of Joseph and his amazing technicolor dreamcoat. He is betrayed by his jealous brothers and sold into slavery. But then he rises to power where he uses his wisdom to save Egypt and his brothers from famine.

                It is the historical story of Francesco, son of a wealthy merchant, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. His self-indulgent lifestyle is interrupted by visions that lead him to forsake riches. He answers a call to care for the poor and sick, becoming the compassionate one known as St. Francis of Assisi.

                It is the fictional story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s T’Challa, a man who must confront dark family secrets and face his rivals. He evades death with the magical heart-shaped herb, and becomes the worthy Black Panther, King of Wakanda.

                It is the true story of my friend Neil, who emerges from a battle with cancer with the courage to end a deteriorating marriage, release his attachment to his identity as a successful doctor, and embrace his calling to creative expression.

                This single storyline will run through your life too, if you let it. That is, if you are looking to find your way home. 

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From The Way Home, by Ben Katt. Copyright © 2024 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group